Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra opened its 2016-2017 season earlier this month with a bravura performance of Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro. Tuesday night, Itzhak Perlman returned to the MSO as a soloist, and the rest of the season promises equally momentous and musically exciting performances.

Over the years, parents and educators have touted the benefits of arts programming in schools.

Visual arts, music, dance and theatre have long been promoted as creative outlets for kids during what might otherwise be considered a fairly routine schedule of classes: math, English, science, social studies.

But many artists and educators in Milwaukee see things a different way. They say it’s all about integrating the arts into those other subjects, to make the school day one big lesson and help kids make connections in their learning lives.

Thursday night, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra will be joined by one of the finest American singers performing today. Soprano Renee Fleming has graced stages around the world to rapturous praise – from the Metropolitan Opera to the 2014 Super Bowl halftime show. She sings opera repertoire, of course, but she also sings jazz and indie, including a 2010 album of covers of songs by the likes of Leonard Cohen and Band of Horses.

This weekend marks the 183rd birthday of the composer Johannes Brahms. The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra celebrates that birthday with performances of both his third and fourth symphonies with one program.

Between rehearsals, Music Director of the MSO, Maestro Edo de Waart, explained his love of Brahms and why he is excited to conduct it this year.

Internationally acclaimed violinist Itzhak Perlman has won fifteen Grammy Awards, performed for Presidents and royalty, and for hundreds of thousands of normal people as well.

Tonight, he’ll perform the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Francesco Lecce-Chong at Uhlein Hall. We had the honor of sitting down with Itzhak Perlman ahead of that performance:

As you may remember, Milwaukee made international headlines last winter when the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster, Frank Almond, was tasered in a parking lot after a performance and the instrument he plays, the Lipinski Stradivarius violin, was stolen from him.

Guest conductor for the Milwaukee Symphony Robert Spano spoke with Bonnie North before the performance of Brahms’s German Requiem this weekend at the Marcus Center.

Johannes Brahms wrote his German Requiem as a memorial to his parents. The mid-19th Century piece is thought by many scholars to be the composer’s most personal work, and listeners frequently connect to its universal themes of loss, as well.

Najda Salerno-Sonnenberg is one of the world’s most celebrated violinists. Her solo performances are electrifying: she combines supreme artistry and musicality with both precision and fearlessness. She dives deeply into the music and takes her audiences along with her on that journey.

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